Balanced diet: Healthy eating improves quality of life

Healthy eating is not about strict dietary limitations, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the food you love. A good diet can improve all aspects of life; it is about feeling great, having more energy, improving your mental health, stabilising your mood.

The foods you eat have huge effects on your health and quality of life. If you feel overwhelmed by all the conflicting nutrition and diet advice out there, you’re not alone. It seems that for every expert who tells you a certain food is good for you, you’ll find another saying exactly the opposite. Although eating healthy can be fairly simple, you just have to:

1. Learn how your diet affects your mental as well as your physical health

2. Set yourself up for success by making changes gradually

3. Don’t think of food as “offlimits”

4. Reduce your portion sizes and fill up with more fruit and veg

5. Learn to spot hidden sugar in your food and avoid it

6. Differentiate between healthy and unhealthy fats

7. Find out how fiber intake can fill you and help lose weight

8. Drink plenty of water and keep yourself well-hydrated

We all know that eating right can help you maintain a healthy weight and avoid certain health problems. Various studies have linked eating a typical Western diet filled with processed meats, packaged meals, takeout food, and sugary snacks with higher rates of depression, stress, bipolar disorders, and anxiety.

Eating an unhealthy diet may even result in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia or an increased risk of suicide in young people.

 Instead of emphasising on one nutrient, we need to move to food-based recommendations. What we eat should be whole, minimally processed, nutritious food as close to its natural form as possible.

 Here are a few recommendations to have a healthy diet:

1. Have breakfast and eat smaller meals throughout the day

2. Avoid eating late at night

3. Cut back on sugar

4. Moderation and not feeling stuffed is the key to a healthy diet

5. We need a balance of proteins, fat, fiber, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals to sustain a healthy body.

Dr Suneet Khanna is a well-knwon nutritionist.